‘Big Daddy’ – Google’s latest major overhaul of its algorithm

Many website owners have been baffled to realize that their websites having thousands of pages indexed in Google database for ages seems to have suddenly disappeared in last 2 months or so, with no trace – effectively erasing their entity from the web and causing untold business losses due to traffic lost.

Experts are indicating that Google’s search engine index, once a clean, lean but monstrous indexing machine, from a Webmaster’s perspective, has been really slipping badly lately.

Another common squawk has been how a Web link of an existing website mysteriously drops from a prominent rank in search results to hundred pages down. Over this period, many website owners have seen traffic to their sites from Google fluctuate quite a bit. The list of complains goes on.

So what seems to going wrong at Google? Many experts are cautiously suggesting that ‘Big Daddy’ – Google’s latest mega search algo update is to blame for these issues.

Every few months Google updates its search algorithm it uses to rank websites in its database. Some of these updates are more significant than others, but because of Google’s market leading position these updates can be extremely significant to many online businesses.

By executing the ‘Big Daddy’ update Google aims not only a bigger slice of the $14 billion Internet advertising market but also to compete much better against nearest rivals Yahoo, no. 2 in search volume and Microsoft, whose online MSN search engine makes it the world’s No. 3 search engine in terms of volume.

Every search engine is constantly tinkering, or buying new companies and absorbing their intellectual property. It’s all to find new ways of attracting an ever bigger audience, which translates into higher advertising revenues. In Google’s case, the ad revenue from Adwords network accounts for almost 99% of the total income making the search algo tinkering even more critical.

According to a post in SearchEngineWatch forum: Google “rolled out some new technology to fix some things, and in the process they seem to have broken some other things. There isn’t much to say about it other than it’s broken-it is what it is and will be over when it’s over.”

So, What’s the Big Deal About BigDaddy?

At first glance, the ‘Big Daddy’ update seems to be much ado about nothing. However, there are some welcome changes that have been included in this update that should make Google a much friendlier place for those who build valuable content-rich websites.

Here is the summary of changes over ‘Big Daddy':

Increasing size and scope of the index – will able to dif deeper now.

URL Canonicalization – determining which URL is the most appropriate for a given page.

Over the next few months, there will also likely be a series of smaller updates that will take advantage of the updated index as a result of giant ‘Big Daddy’ update.

Its widely believed, because of ‘Big Daddy’ update, Google must have resorted to completely erase the old search index databases of estimated 8 billion Webpages. That explains why websites progressively disappear – a few days or weeks at a time rather than all at once.

As Google has history of not openly discuss its search database udpate issues, experts have been advising affected website owners keep patience as its believed that once ‘Big Daddy’ is fully deployed the new index would stabilize and disappeared sites would restore in index with, hopefully, same ranking as before.

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